Episode 6: Dr. Judah Cohen (Indiana University, Bloomington)

The sixth episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Judah Cohen. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on and beyond the field of American Jewish music.

Dr. Judah Cohen is Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture, Professor of Musicology, and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research, and Creative Activity at Indiana University Bloomington’s Jacobs School of Music. A scholar and administrator with both ethnographic and historical training, he has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Israel, Uganda and the Caribbean. He has written three books and several dozen articles on music in Judaism, including The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (2009), Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011), and Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America (2019). His historical and ethnographic work on Caribbean Jewish life includes his 2004 monograph Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. And his work in the discipline medical ethnomusicology involved fieldwork with HIV/AIDS drama groups in southwestern Uganda, as well as the co-edited volume The Culture of AIDS in Africa (2011, with Gregory Barz). At IU Bloomington, he has served as Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program and as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. In Fall 2025, he will return to Hebrew Union College as the next Provost.